Dominic Cavendish interviews Grzegorz Bral, director of Song of the Goat, the
theatre company from Wroclaw, Poland currently wowing the UK.

“Do you have this expression in England, 'Taking wood to the forest?'” Grzegorz Bral, the director of Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat theatre), asks me, with the quite shaming, highly assured grasp of English that is so characteristic of his countrymen. Well, yes, after a fashion, I respond: “We would say - 'Taking, or carrying, coals to Newcastle'.” “Ah yes,” the bright-eyed Pole responds, instantly fascinated, beaming with delight. “That is what we’re doing with our Macbeth in the UK - taking coals to Newcastle!”

Moving rapidly from being a cult attraction to an award-laden international force - the Barbican run of its radical revisioning of the Scottish play has practically sold out - Song of the Goat, which devises its work in a 14th-century monastery in Wrocław - sits slightly out on a limb compared with much contemporary Polish theatre.

There’s a huge amount of energy at the moment in the Polish scene - and outside interest in that activity. In September, the Dublin theatre festival devoted a whole strand to work hailing from this industrious neck of the Eastern European woods. According to Pawel Potoroczyn, the director of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, which supported that season and has facilitated Song of the Goat’s first UK tour, in conjunction with the POLSKA! YEAR cultural programme, Polish theatre is going through a renaissance. “It’s not just a notion, it’s a provable phenomenon - a quite unprecedented explosion of creative talent,” he argues.

Bral, who formed Teatr Pieśń Kozła in the mid-1990s with Anna Zubrzycka - both at that time actors with the renowned Lublin-based company Gardzienice - is quietly insistent that their work shouldn’t be lumped in with that of their contemporaries. “We’re probably not representative,” he explains. “What we do is something quite specific. I don’t think anything comparable to what we do exists anywhere else.”

Certainly a sense of being exceptional, possibly even un-categorisable, by British standards holds true to their fleet-footed, compressed version of Macbeth, which effectively turns Shakespeare’s five-act tragedy into a 75-minute polyphonic experience, at once breathless and breath-taking, beautiful and primal.

First seen as a work-in-progress during the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival, the text, chopped this way and that, draws on the original English but it’s half-sung, half-spoken, and Corsican chants are layered into it too. The darkness of the story, its atmosphere of evil, bubbles forth in the incantatory nature of the approach. The actors - an international ensemble of eight - are bare-foot and kitted out in simple robes that combine elements of kilts and Celtic clobber with samurai warrior-wear. They underscore their movements with much dexterous deployment of wooden staves. Physically, they’re more than just agile - their sinuous movements appear to be totally in-tune with the vocals.

“The whole idea is that the performance is one body,” Bral, a youthful-looking 49 going on 50, explains. “You have the heart, brain, liver - different organs functioning together. The actors must not only memorise the work and go from place to place - they must work off each other. It’s very complex really, our method - you couldn’t put it down in a book, I could only show it to you. When the actors heard how many things they have to do at the same time, they were like 'This is impossible!'”

“This work will confront the way a lot of British theatre is made,” he continues, with a mischievous twinkle. “That is one of the things that excites me so much. We are doing something very strange. If people come and see our Shakespeare, it will have nothing to do with the kind of Shakespeare they are used to. We don’t destroy the text. On the contrary we are trying to find aspects of it that are normally not used - we’re finding the musicality of it. It’s a certain vision of him, as a writer, as being like Mozart or Bach. He is a composer. He composes our feelings. Even the line 'Which one of you have done this?', has an incredibly powerful music. Or again, “What’s done cannot be undone”. The word Duncan is hidden inside that - and so on and so on.”

Song of the Goat, of course, draws its name from the derivation of the word tragedy (τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song"). “Greek tragedy,” Bral reminds us, “was very much based on music. We know that there were particular notations above the words showing precisely the vocal structure and nature of the piece. The words were not just information - they had a very particular musicality. What we’re trying to do is find a musicality that speaks to us now. Music avoids your brain, it goes straight into your heart - you like it or not, you feel it or not. Our aim is to create a channel that avoids your thoughts and reaches directly into your feelings. And through that tunnel we can send the train of Shakespeare’s words!” Sending coals to Newcastle, then, and stoking up a furnace…